Multi-touching the dream

Abstract

You know the situation: you're in a meeting and you need to check some facts only you didn't bring your laptop, and just one person can logon to the Wi-Fi so everyone is crowding around that screen gesticulating, trying to get their point across... It is this kind of problem that the Centre for Interaction Design at Edinburgh Napier University is working to overcome. In January 2009, the university funded a project to explore the impact of emerging technologies on how we live our lives and go about our daily activities in public, private and social spaces. This project is called Future Living Future Life and it seeks to deliver real-world practical benefits by designing, developing and implementing a series of future spaces, the first of which is the Future Meeting Room. So just what is a Future Meeting Room? Well, essentially it is a space designed to use the very cutting edge of current and emerging technologies to facilitate local and remote collaborative activities. In less academic terms, this means brainstorming, mind mapping, document or project review and creation in fact, anything that requires people to work together in real time. As you might imagine, this covers a lot of things.